How Social Movements Catalyze Firm Innovation

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Odziemkowska, Kate; Zhu, Yiying
• 署名单位: University of Toronto; Montclair State University
• 刊物名称: ORGANIZATION SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1047-7039
• DOI: 10.1287/orsc.2023.17497
• 发表日期: 2025
• 关键词: innovation; social movements; climate change; private politics; cross-sector collaboration

摘要

We investigate the impact that social movements have on firm innovation through private politics. We argue that firms strategically respond to private politics by investing in new technologies that address movement-advocated issues material to firms' performance. Although both contentious private politics-when activists contentiously target firms-and cooperative private politics-when activists and firms collaborate-catalyze innovation, they do so in different ways. Contentious private politics increases the amount of innovation that firms undertake by drawing managerial attention to movementadvocated issues material to the firm, prompting search for solutions to those issues. Conversely, cooperative private politics provides firms access to new knowledge that encourages firms to search for solutions in areas more distant from their existing knowledge and in so doing, increase innovation involving distant recombination on material issues. We find support for our arguments in a matched sample of firms contentiously targeted and with activist collaborations on climate change issues and firms that were not targets of private politics on those issues but had otherwise similar histories of climate-related innovation and relationships with climate movements and other environmental movements. Supplementary analyses corroborate the mechanisms that undergird our theoretical predictions; contentious private politics is associated with more innovation closer to a firm's expertise, whereas cooperative private politics is associated with innovations that draw on more distant knowledge. We also find that when collaboration follows contention, their respective impacts on innovation are reduced, which may result from firms seeking collaborations for their legitimacygranting benefits after contention rather than the learning opportunities they offer.